Wednesday, November 11, 2015

We have a
desert, and we have a few cars driving through. There is another mini-vehicle
seemingly filming them and giving them directions. Obviously we are watching
this whole thing. But when the figure of Mr. Oliver Laxe narrates a riddle
against a backdrop of white, and the next cut to what seems like a white desert
(Sahara) is so hard and the match on the color so true that one feels Mr. Laxe
practically vanishes. We see three figures walking across the desert and the
screen, in what seems like black hooded dresses, humming some folk song, and
the whole moment has narrative written all over it. They walk slowly, as a
tribe would, for civilization (especially urban) is aggressive. More so against
nature. We create a perception. Mr. Rivers gives us a cut. To a guy singing
some folk song, and this time around his hooded robe is just plain sandy brown
with some design. Not reductive black. When he completes his song, the camera
pans down and the guy gives a thumbs up. Now, I believe a thumbs
up is essentially European, and at the very least a symbol of a civilization
that just doesn’t sit well with these slow-moving folk-singing tribes. So
yeah, we have our first anachronism. You see, there is always the unmistakable air
of privilege that walks with the agent of civilization. I traveled once to this
village in Konkan, some 50 odd km from Pune, as part of a NGO team, carrying
Dettol soaps. We spent a few hours there discussing with those people on how to
educate their kids and how necessary it was to have a good bath, and preferably
with those Dettol soaps, which we gratuitously distributed. Those folks were watching us do our thing, while we were
conducting ourselves. Between our dressing and our confident demeanor and the
very fact that we had “invaded” their territory and were “concerned” about
their way of living, we had “privileged” written all over us. I was acutely
aware of this tension, and in no small measure disgusted by it. There was a
certain sense of lack, if you will, on the part of the villagers, just as was
will those sex-workers in Kamathipura when Ms. Ashley Judd paid them a
missionary (not catholic, but AIDS awareness) visit a few years back. There was
guilt too, probably on my part, and if you were to imagine my predicament, you
would have essentially two sets of eyes – one watching us, and one watching “them”
watching us. The otherification is probably inevitable. What is essential though
is the affirmation of the identities, because for us to be us they need to be
them. This staging though is alright inasmuch as we are lost in our performance
of privilege as agents of culture and unaware of any other set of eyes other
than the one intently listening to us. The expectation is that Ms. Judd speaks
about AIDS and the sex workers listen, or the sex workers speak about their
lack of knowledges and maybe even their plight and Ms. Judd listens. But, if we
have an alternate set of eyes intently looking at this conversation being
performed, and the camera is distracted by it we probably have something of a
breakdown.

A simple variation is where the tribe performs the rituals while
we/agents arrive to “understand” the alien
culture, and approximate it. The agents remain in their privileged position of
anthropologists (filmmakers/documentarists) and connoisseurs of rituals as long
as they are performed. But if one of them throws a thumbs up, or say
flips-a-bird, or say just turns around and starts watching the camera or starts
watching the agents watch the ritual, you have a Matrix-like anomaly to the proceedings. The reductive narrative of
the ritual doesn’t align any longer, and one is acutely aware of the disruption
in the whole dynamic. We are watching them watching us. Just as the sanctity,
or let us say efficacy, of the missionary’s rite is disturbed, the filmmaker’s
rite – i.e. filmmaking – goes for a toss too. I mean, broadly speaking, filmmaking
would mostly contain less of a “capture” (don’t so many filmmakers love that
word?) and more of a restaging of events so as to validate them as the established
truth, and more importantly use that truth to underline the essential
difference between the one filming and the one being filmed. The agent of civilization
has the right to stare, while the performer (tribe) has the duty to perform.
You could say, it is exploitation of a different nature. I will say, just about
now, I guess, the opening shots of the cars and the film-crew feels like an
essential afterthought to homogenize narratively the dissonance that follows
next.

Let me describe
the dissonance, and then arrive at the whole description from an extremely
literal point-of-view. While the author is effectively “wiped-out” from the screen,
instead replacing it with a white desert with folks dressed in black we have an
eye (camera, perspective) that is finding a space (real, mythic) which can
affirm the identity of the subject, thus confirming the identity of the
observer. Those folks sing, and they are a homogenized spectacle, if you will.
Homogenized by the music of that song, I suspect, and Mr. Rivers seems to be
searching for that one true note not only in the space but in the sounds too.
The note of affirmation. But it all feels labored, the strain already felt
(just as I am searching for that one key moment for transformation). You see, I
haven’t seen much of Mr. Rivers and the tension between his rejection of the
material as straight up representation is pretty evident in the manner in which
an alternate meta-camera (as in the opening scene) watches the other performers
watching the filmmaking unfold. But is it arrived at here, in Morocco, while
making The Sky Trembles, or if it had
already been arrived at, as if declaring that this is just a necessary state of
affairs, I don’t know.

A main actor yells – “The Sheik has gone” – while others sit and
watch and laugh. While the fiction cinema tries to pretend to be some kind of ethnographic
documentary, there is the third eye trying to make sense of this tableaux, this
dynamic between the agent the tribesman and the unwritten/unmentioned deal to
maintain the illusion while it breaks down. We see a ritual being performed
over a dead body, at a comfortable distance, and there is a certain degree of
harmony there between the observer and the performer. But Mr. River cuts to a
boy, seeing us seeing them, and the harmony is disturbed. Are we capturing a
ritual, or are we seeing a performance? And if the latter is essentially
symbolic in nature (and not real), would it be better served both aesthetically
and morally to indeed simulate the whole ritual by means of a fake dead body
(for some reason there are empty plastic bottles which will make an anachronistic
entry later), and by reenacting the whole tableaux including asking the little
boy to see us see the ritual again? Will that compensate? Will it find the
point of truth? We are in a Charlie Kauffman kind of a self-reflexive
environment trying to ascertain what is feeding of what, and I
feel the need to share this amusing gif just to approximate the whole dynamic.
For the whole of the initial section, that little girl is us.

Mr. Rivers isn’t
having much luck finding the one musical note either that gives his film that
point of truth it is looking for in this land. It is fake all around, and
acutely aware of it. The lines spoken by the actors (natives) do not satisfy the
filmmaker’s references. The subtitles aren’t present and we aren’t sure whether
what is being spoken has any meaning. It is just inconsequential sounds. While
the folk songs try and create for immersive homogenized cinema, even in long
shots where folks climb down/up a hill, the spell is broken whenever we hear
every day noises causing us to appreciate the diversity within this setting and
the utter failure of any homogenizing endeavor, the disillusionment towards
which is complete when an accident and a crowd and several vehicles on a tar
road seem to provide the kind of organic material (with blood? A symbol?) that
Mr. Rivers is searching for in the desert.

Now I hope
you understand the predicament here, and I seem to have spent a whole lot of
words describing it. But just to give a point of reference, who I believe is
Mr. Rivers’, or for that matter the filmmaker’s (here, played by Mr. Laxe)
brother from another mother – Mr. Quentin Tarantino – we need to imagine how he
probably would have felt staging his alternate-history ritual in Django Unchained through genre-tropes.
Is he actualizing/rewriting the history via the fantasy of representational/fictional
cinema? Is he aware that his set of eyes viewing and rewriting history are just
as important as the narrative involving the black Django? I suspect he is,
acutely so as a matter of fact, and he releases this tension (partly as a
variation of the above, partly as identifying himself as the representation of
a white man) by inserting himself as a performer to be given equal opportunity
to be exploited by history/cinema/narrative/ritual and thereby literally
exploding (read: purging) out of it.

The filmmaker,
probably disillusioned by the efficacy of filmmaking as a tool to find the
point of truth to complete/affirm the truth, seems to walk away assuming the
role of a white man in search of the territory on his own, in a truck, leaving
behind his film and allowing himself to be an object in Mr. Rivers’. The tension
is greatly eased, it is just his eye lost in the reality of kids playing soccer
and a girl clanking rocks against each other pursued by Mr. Rivers’ camera, gears
click, and the adaptation of Mr. Bowles’ A
Distant Episode follows. The filmmaker’s tongue is sliced (his language,
the basic unit of any culture is taken away), and by covering his entire body
in a robe of tin can lids, he is just as much a performer as the natives are in
their black hooded robes. The whole dynamic is now reduced to an easy binary –
them versus him – and the accentuation of the otherification of the natives
only serves to emphasize the truth in the narrative – of a white man captured
in a foreign land, exploited and sold as a slave. The story is now about him, as
it always was, for it never could be about them. Ethnography gives way to
fiction, or maybe something even more, say a snuff film, and when we see the
filmmaker running away from it all, from his own narrative, from this space he
came to let us culturally approximate, we know it is nigh impossible. It might
be terribly symbolic, maybe a tad poetic when we think of it against the
opening shot, but for some reason, I find the utter helplessness a tad moving.